The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Negrín decided to form a new government, but he restricted the changes in his cabinet to replacing Aiguader and Irujo with José Moix of the Catalan communist PSUC and Tomás Bilbao, of Acción Nacionalista Vasca. He then left for Zurich, officially to take part in an international medical conference, but also to have secret talks either with ‘some pro-Franco Germans’, according to Azaña,⁴ or with the German ambassador to France, Count Welczek, according to Hugh Thomas,⁵ or as has often been said with the Duke of Alba, to try to find a negotiated settlement of the war. Whichever the case, Negrín was attempting to find a way to finish the war while attacking his opponents as defeatists.

The Anglo-Italian treaty of April 1938, which signified the tacit acceptance of Italian intervention, had been a serious blow to the Republic’s hopes of winning international support. The Munich agreement of September was far more serious. This climax of appeasement did not only signify that British policy towards Spain would not change, it also led to Stalin’s decision that the Soviet Union’s best interests lay in a rapprochement with Hitler. Soviet support for the Republic was starting to be an embarrassment.

The Munich agreement marked, too, the postponement of the European war on which Negrín was counting to force Great Britain and France to aid the Republic. In fact, it was rash of him to believe that even then their intervention would have been worth much. There would be little incentive for the British government to aid a severely weakened Republic at a time when all available armaments would be needed for its own forces. Moreover, active participation would have exposed Gibraltar to Franco’s forces before a programme for improving the Rock’s defences had started.

On the other hand the Republic’s other potential ally, France, was starting to resent the British government’s domination of its foreign policy. The French had been forced consistently from one compromise to another in what they had thought was the cause of democratic unity. Yet Chamberlain was in some ways closer to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler in his belief that France was politically and morally decadent. Fear of their traditional German enemy, combined with resentment against the anti-French attitude prevalent in the British government, had made even some conservative army officers feel they should intervene in Catalonia on the Republic’s behalf. But the French general staff was firmly opposed to any move which might result in a war on two fronts. It was therefore greatly relieved, during the Czechoslovakian crisis, when Franco (on British advice) assured them of Spanish neutrality in the event of a European war, and also gave his guarantee that Axis troops would not approach the Pyrenean frontier. Ciano was sickened by this pandering to France, but the German and Italian regimes were at least reassured that France, as well as Great Britain, would do nothing to hinder their intervention in Spain. Yet Franco, as already mentioned, continued to fear it obsessively.

In fact, the proceedings of the Non-Intervention Committee had never given them cause for alarm. The sittings continued as before, despite the Anglo-Italian pact in April. ‘The entire negotiation in the committee’, the German representative reported, ‘has something unreal about it since all participants see through the game of the other side…The non-intervention policy is so unstable and is such an artificial creation that everyone fears to cause its collapse by a clear “no”, and then have to bear the responsibility.’⁶ The plan for the withdrawal of volunteers, which the British had originated as a formula to retard the granting of belligerent rights, had been undermined in the Anglo-Italian pact. Lord Halifax had deemed a partial withdrawal of troops sufficient to satisfy the spirit of the non-intervention agreement.

Franco had been unsure how to react to the revised British plan for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Spain, once it had been agreed by the committee in London on 5 July. He had asked his allies for advice, and they counselled him to accept in principle, but delay in practice. On 26 July Negrín’s government accepted the withdrawal proposals, even though it was deeply disturbed at the prospect of the nationalists’ being awarded belligerent rights. This meant that even ships flying the British flag would become liable to search, thus allowing the blockade to become completely effective. Eventually, on 16 August, Franco made his reply to the British representative, Robert Hodgson. He demanded belligerent rights before the British minimum figure for withdrawal of 10,000 men on each side had been reached. His attitude was almost certainly encouraged by the fact that the British had pressured the French into closing the frontier to republican war matériel.